The History Channel’s Amelia Earhart: The Lost Evidence Mockumentary

always be skeptical…

Ahem… so…

The Story

A new theory about the fate of Amelia Earhart is seriously undermined by evidence obtained by The Daily Beast. The theory, to be aired Sunday in a History Channel documentary, claims that Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, were rescued by the Japanese after crash landing in the Marshall Islands and then taken to a Japanese prison where they died in captivity.

The pivot of the documentary’s case is a photograph, undated, of a wharf at Jaluit Island, one of the scores of atolls that make up the Marshall Islands. A forensic expert who specializes in facial recognition appears in the program to support the claim that Earhart and Noonan are among a group of people on the wharf.

Just beyond the wharf, in the harbor, is a Japanese military vessel identified as the Koshu Maru. The documentary suggests that after this picture was taken Earhart and Noonan were arrested and taken aboard the Koshu Maru and that a barge alongside contained the remains of their Lockheed Electra airplane.

According to the documentary, it is likely that the Koshu Maru then sailed for the island of Saipan where the two Americans were imprisoned and then killed.

Based off of just that part of the story… this is not an actual historical documentary but rather a sensationalist, lazy, nonsensical TV show meant to attract as many eyeballs as possible.

This is not a new thing of course…

The Cannibal in the Jungle was an incredibly sensationalist mockumentary about cannibal hobbits in Indonesia. That’s not a joke. And of course there are all of the “Mermaids are Totally Real” mockumentaries (I think there are three now), and of course every single big foot show ever made. They’re all fake, they all pretend to be real, they are all sensationalist nonsense.

They are screwing with you to make money.

Which is in style for what were formally “factual” TV networks… they no longer make factual TV shows and instead rely on reality TV shows and mockumentaries to increases their ratings, and their ad dollars, by luring people in with wildly sensationalist claims.
The History Channel is no longer about actual history.
The Discovery channel is no longer about science.
Animal Planet is no longer about animals.

It’s all just one big swizzle, it’s all lazy bullsquirt that is cheap to make and requires no kind of serious time consuming work… Like verifying with experts that what you’re about to air is factual.

Which brings us to Amelia Earhart: The Lost Evidence.

Okay lets tear the story apart…

Amelia Earhart: The Lost Evidence Description:

“Former FBI official Shawn Henry investigates evidence supporting the theory that aviator Amelia Earhart was captured by the Japanese military, including a photograph that purports to show Earhart and Fred Noonan after their crash.”

You’ll notice the use of various retired government workers to lend their story credence. But within the first five minutes, the show has already reached their own conclusion and dismissed other possibilities.

They’re operating off of a faulty assumption, that Earhart only ran out of fuel, that there couldn’t possibly be a malfunction, or that planes and people can in fact sink into the vastness of the Pacific ocean and leave little to nothing behind.

They also completely ignore that all of their evidence has no actual connection to Amelia Earhart and very well could be from other planes / people.

Example: the rolled aluminum… Lockheed made over a hundred copies of the Model 10 Electra that Amelia flew and it was actively by the US military during WWII. It’s easy to see how a bit of metal that matches her plane could be on that island.

They also ignore the fact that debris can and does move over the course of 70+ years.

Which is amazing frankly.

The History Channel is exploiting people’s mistrust of the government by claiming it is in fact a government conspiracy while also using former government employees to make their “investigation” seem real, serious, and knowledgeable.

They ultimately dismiss these other possibilities because they’re inconvenient and if actually investigated would make for an actual historical show… Which is no longer what the History Channel does. It is simply not sensational enough.

The actors continue in the same vein later on…

“Navy files for this particular period are missing throughout the national archives”

Yeah so… If Americans got a dollar for every document hidden by the Federal government directly before and during war time we’d all be billionaires. The current norm of the government being required to divulge its work to the American public did not exist at the time and would not exist until the Freedom of Information Act of 1966 forced the government to change its ways.

We continue on…

The best part is that directly after being shown an undated, detail poor, photo claiming to be of Earhart on the Jalut island area of the Marshall islands… The narrator is *telling you* that IT IS a photo of them.

The photo is undated for gods sake! There isn’t enough detail to know who any of those people are and there is no technology that can currently change that fact.

Skepticism is completely lost in this show. Everything is unquestioning.

“the hair is too short for a man and too short for a woman who’s a native”

The entire show is such a joke. I mean honestly…

Not once did they think that the person seated in the picture has their hair hanging over their shoulder onto their front.

Not only could a girl have done that… A boy certainly could’ve had that long of hair.

*sigh*

This is the reality of Amelia Earhart: The Lost Evidence. It is nonsencial, the evidence is not evidence at all, the show actively rephrases things to make it sound like their point was proven right, and there is absolutely no skepticism.

It is not a historical TV show, it is not a true investigation, it is a mockumentary meant to exploit people’s willingness to hear people out and turn their genuine feelings into ad dollars.

An Aside

People talk about exploitation, about how capitalism is evil, and all of their examples are always of asinine policies in the work place or inappropriate manual labor standards… they completely miss some of the most insidious behavior that exists in our world.

Break policies can be changed in a second you know.

But companies actively exploiting human emotion can cause damage to such a degree and in so many non-quantifiable ways that there is little hope of fixing the damage done.